Why I Participated in the Infobarrel Monthly Contest

We are nearing the end of the month and it is going to be a close finish in the Infobarrel monthly contest. Several writers are trying hard to get in the top 3 in order to get an Amazon voucher, but is that really the most important reason to participate in this contest?

When I first signed up for Infobarrel over a year ago, I submitted a few articles and never really thought much of it. The articles I submitted were meant to be just another article in my backlinking strategies and that was that. I never visited the forum, never met the community and never really participated.

My account lay dormant for many months and I never got around promoting any of the few articles that I had submitted. I did get the occasional adsense click and even though they were in the higher regions, each over $1, I was not considering to go back to submitting articles over here.

That changed recently though as some of you might have noticed, because of a challenge I am participating in over at The Keyword Academy. Now I must say, I am a huge fan of TKA and have been a member over there for well over a year. I have learned a lot over there and I believe I will remain a member for life, because of the huge support system, tools and great guest posting system they run.

Because of many personal changes this past year I did not get the amount of work done that should have been done to obtain a comfortable standard of living, so participating in the forementioned challenge is sort of a life saver for me at present. The challenge started this past October 15th and consisted of writing and publishing as much content as possible in order to build online portfolio. This meant either publishing content on your own sites, publishing content on revenue sharing sites or publishing content to build links to your money making content.

In these past 8 weeks I have published 150K of words all over the net, building my websites and several writing accounts and if I compare that to the rest of my time working online, it is a huge jump forwards. This monthly contest on Infobarrel has been playing a big part in that and the more I started to write and publish, the more enthousiastic I became again about my online career.

Participating in challenges and contests is what could give you that extra umpf if you are feeling low on energy, if you feel like all this work online is not going to go anywhere, and it certainly has given me the extra push this month to write and publish content, not only over here but also on ezinearticles and Squidoo, among other places.

Especially if you are dealing with procrastination issues, the monthly Infobarrel contest is great to participate in because it will push you to write more every time you see your name in the list of contest participants, wanting to go up that list every day. Staying in the top 3 though is a whole other story!

When I wrote my Infobarrel contest article and was doing the research in the beginning of this month, it was just a little game of numbers to me. Looking at the amount of points it had taken the winners to grab the number one spot I started deviding that in the number of articles one had to write to top that. Devide that by 30 days and you would have a good estimation of the number of articles you would have to write each day as to make a fighting chance to win the $100 Amazon voucher (and of course the thrilling feeling of ending at the top that month).

So I calculated and sort of came up with a plan that could possibly work out.

To be honest though, it is not that easy and I have gotten a lot more admiration for those people who have won in the past. I am just not able to write every day, far from that. It just does not fit with my lifestyle or maybe I am just making too many excuses not to write daily. I actually creating a Squidoo lens on daily writing goals in an attempt to start working more consistently.

But writing daily articles is just not my thing. There are days I really need to break and not think article writing. There are days that I just donÂ´t feel like thinking in another language in order to be able to write. There are days that life just pops up and leaves me no way to write. And then there are those days that I just donÂ´t know what to write about and any keyword I have researched and should write about just stares me in the face, laughing at me.

So in the end, I think I only write half the days of the month, making the days that I do write a lot more stressful and harder. This is where the monthly Infobarrel contest really helped me, inspiring me to keep at it and writing articles no matter what. So in a way, even if I get beaten in the end, I will be thankful to my competitors for having been able to get the best out of me and make me aware of a few things I really needed to learn and see for myself.

I am grateful to them and the rest of the Infobarrel community for being so supportive, for making me rethink about why I am doing this line of work, why I competed in the contest in the first place and I am grateful for having received the kick in the butt that I needed, to get this far. I will probably meet my writing goals for this month, reaching 150 articles published over here and with a little luck I will end up in the top three.

If you are struggling right now with your writing goals and having a hard time writing, I would encourage you to set up a plan and some specific goals for next month, start planning and then stick to it. Challenge yourself by participating in a contest, either over here or anywhere else, but make sure you are out there publishing.

Comments

Great article Maya! I'm only writing for IB and that's taking all my time, I can't imagine writing for so many sites without going completely mad.
I definitely agree that writing breaks are a necessity. Even though I find it stressful to write 10 articles in a day, I think it would be worse to write 5 EVERY day.

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Nice article. I want to compete in the contest next month. I finally got an understanding of how it worked this month and after next month I will be involved in a few other projects. So next month has to be it.

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I'm with you Dpeach,
We started about the same time and it does take a while to get familiar with this place. The forums help but it still takes time.
Like you I have many areas I'm working in and spending enough time to compete with the heavy hitters,
like AJ, Maya and others, just isn't possible, But I'm going for the December prize too and my speach to type software is on the way so watch out AJ, anyone who knows me will tell you, I talk way too much. (~;